


ness/dragonfriendverse, suicidal ideation remix

by braintics (magistrate)



Category: White Collar
Genre: AU - Urban Fantasy(ish), Angst, Braintic, Episode: s03e08 As You Were, Gen, So much angst, WIP Amnesty, oddly unfunny crackfic, our boys being bad at emotion, passively suicidal ideation, stuck between a rock and a hard place, vaguely ridiculous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-15
Updated: 2014-04-15
Packaged: 2018-02-21 19:41:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2480105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magistrate/pseuds/braintics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>S3 break-it braintic.  In which Neal is suffering a lot more psychological stress at the prospect of dismantling almost everything he knows about his life and going on the run again than he's willing to admit to anyone... even himself. And, unfortunately for his safe-cracking break-in plans, unbeknownst to everyone, Peter has an invisible dragon living in his house.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ness/dragonfriendverse, suicidal ideation remix

**Author's Note:**

> My braintics are rough scribbles, written out to varying degrees of incompleteness, which for one reason or another (vastly unconquerable scope, logical/logistical/self-indulgent problems inherent in the premise, loss of interest halfway through, etc.) will never actually turn into complete fics. They're presented here because leaving them to languish in my scratch folders seems like a shame. Though I may eventually find myself writing more on them, I have no expectation of polishing or finishing any of them.
> 
> I write nonlinearly, which means that my written braintics tend to skip around a lot. While reading, you may encounter a
> 
> >
> 
> and then find yourself anywhere from half a sentence to several plot arcs ahead of where you were, with no notice, cause, or segue. Just pretend you're an archaeologist reading some long-forgotten tale off a damaged stone tablet, and it'll all be good.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this glimpse into the sausage-making portions of my brain!
> 
> * * *

>

Mozzie kept telling him _we don't have to like it, but it has to be done._   Kept looking at him with pity and empathy like he was dying of cancer or something. _I know how important it is – the bond you have with the suit.  Just remember, it's not who we are._

 _Who he was_ was apparently anathema to everything he'd convinced himself to want, of late.

Lie about your identity long enough and it was bound to get muddled. By now Neal had worn so many skins that no matter which he'd put on, he kept feeling them out for seams. Mozzie seemed to think his whole life at the moment was akin to getting a foot stuck in a beartrap: if he couldn't just wriggle out, the next best thing would be to lose the leg. No matter that it was an amputation. No matter if he was ripping in half. In the name of freedom, a little thing like _home_ was not too much to lose.

Though even with all Mozzie's careful empathy, his gentle pushing, it didn't change the fact that Neal could feel himself tearing in two.

Facts were, Mozzie was going to leave, no matter what. And no matter what, Peter would be here in New York, an FBI agent to the bone.  New York had the stability of being unhunted; had Peter and Elizabeth and June and Sara, though Sara had already drifted.  It had a place he could wake up every morning and recognize as home. Had a place to walk into every day and see himself and his _belonging_ reflected there.

Mozzie had his past, or the best part of it.  Mozzie had the parts of himself which he'd never be able to explain to the people who surrounded him, with their legal obligations and rosy notions of justice and law.  With Mozzie went all the ties to a life he actually had control over.  All the easy rapport of having someone he could rely on, who he'd never had to hide anything from.  Someone who trusted him implicitly.

He was going to lose one or the other.

>

 _Has to be done._ Peter knew exactly what he was; maybe he was an idiot for ever trusting him. Maybe Neal was an idiot for ever trusting himself. _Nothing sadder than a con man conning himself_ , Adler said, and Mozzie had thought about a happy ending with a house and a family and said, _That's the biggest con of all._

>

and set the sound analyzer against the safe's door.

>

something huge and jet-black and monstrous, hard as diamond and smelling like heat and fire.  He yelped as sharp points of pressure cut into the skin above his heart, then gave another, abortive scream as his brain processed _wild animal, beast, predator_ and sent out a few frantic commands to his limbs to _struggle, run, get away_ – but the claws _(claws, they were claws, digging into him like so much meat)_ pushed down harder and he stopped moving, then, staring into the alcohol-fire blue eyes, fixed over a swept-forward muzzle like a wolf or a vulture, a maneater's jaw of sharp teeth opened in anger or hunger.

 _Dragon,_ his mind filled in; then, _St. George, Raphael,_ but that dragon had been a pathetic, doggish thing, its eyes almost inviting the lance, not the towering coil of black scales and smooth muscles he was facing here.  Still, there wasn't another word for it – the wings which mantled at the edges of his peripheral vision, the line of the nose from flared nostrils to sloped brow, up into the horns which bristled like a field of pikes.

Eyes that blazed cold blue, leaving spots whether he met them or not. _Tyger, tyger,_ offered a corner of his mind. _Burnt the fire of thine eyes._

The claws moved inside his skin and he made a choked noise; the pain thrummed through him like a cursory thing.  Somehow, the reality of that injury – five sharp stabs through the pectorals and obliques, the threat of claw scraping against bone – made it hardly seem worth asking why there was a dragon in Peter's bedroom.  And what the hell, right?–maybe this was something that deserved a little more attention, this clearly biologically and logically impossible thing happening right in front of him, happening _to_ him.  But all he could find was a broken laugh, a kind of tired humor at the sheer absurdity of it.  All the uncertainty, the stalling, the dread, and as it turned out there was a dragon in Peter's house and it was going to eat him.

He could feel the blood beading on his chest, soaking into the black shirt under his jacket.  The pain had a clarity and immediacy that had been lost in the limbo his life had settled into, and it was an odd kind of relief to know that nothing in the world outside of this threat mattered; that everything in his universe had been plucked out of his hands and condensed down to this one point.  (Not the _dying_ part; that was no relief.  He could feel his body reacting to that with all the terror he'd expect of it: his heart was going way too fast, the ringing in his ears was drowning out everything but the dragon's hissing breath, and there was more tension in his muscles than they could sustain, all braced for the moment those claws would rip into him, those teeth would tear him open.  But that was the certainty – the one possibility which had drowned out everything else.  Where all that confusion had been, there was silence.)

The dragon leaned in, its muzzle almost touching him, and he found that the laughter continued.  It was a pale, broken noise, but there was no question what it was.

It seemed confused, at that.  Its teeth closed with a _snik_ , though its lips didn't close over them; Neal watched its eyes flick between his, with an almost human question in them.

"What are you waiting for?" he asked, and to his own ears, his voice sounded – almost gentle.  Encouraging.  _That's not right._   He swallowed, collapsed back, not that there was much room left for collapse.  "Though, if you're listening, I don't suppose we could do this somewhere other than here."

Peter and Elizabeth – _god_ , he didn't want to think about what would happen if this thing was just stalking through the neighborhood, hunting in the urban jungle because whatever hunting grounds it once had had been paved over and built up centuries ago. But even if they were missing the danger, they didn't need the evidence of what was sure to be a messy predation spread out at the foot of their bed. Blood and whatever bits of organ or bone weren't palatable to this thing, scattered all across the carpet.

At that the dragon's lips sealed, and it leaned forward, more weight against the claws in his chest.

His entire body tensed, but the claws didn't seem to matter. Just a renewed burst of pain, and the soft wet pressure of blood being lapped up by his shirt fabric.  A rush of hot, dry air over his face and neck as the dragon sniffed him, checking his hair, his collar, then down to the blood under its hand, across his chest, down his arm and up it again, down across the line of his pelvis and leg, finally returning to stare at him with those too-bright eyes.  They'd left afterimages, when they went away.

Then, before he could say anything else, it withdrew its hand and swiped him to the ground, where he caught himself on the palms of his hands just in time for its mouth to close on the back of his jacket and jerk him upward, hauling him like a deer carcass toward the door.

He managed to get his legs under him just enough to stumble into the hallway and miss a few of the stairs with his shins; he was still plenty knocked around by the time they got to the ground floor, and the dragon was hauling him out the back door (which it opened, clawed hand just as facile as a human one, and closed with a flick of its tail; one absurdity in a series of them) and then around one of the old trees that demarcated the Burke's lawn, and–

 _Somewhere._   He must have flinched and missed something, or possibly it was just one of those things that only made as much sense as a dragon did, because then they were going _down_ past a layer of earth and into a cave that looked rough-hewn and melted and resolidified into a kind of stability, the walls smooth and organic, the ground packed dirt scattered with–

Scattered with bone.  Fragments of bone, snatches of fur.  A hoof, still attached to its joint, there near the entrance.  There wasn't much else he could see; the dragon's eyes only cast enough light to illuminate the edges of things, give him the sense of what was to come.

A strangled noise escaped his throat, and he regarded it with a kind of surprise.  The part of him that had already given up seemed to control his words and his limbs; the rest of him was reacting as a living thing should, when faced with the prospect of its immediate extinction.

The dragon let him go and he scrambled back further into the den, shoulders pressed against the forged or petrified earth.

He knew what this place was.  A larder.  Some animals did that – killed and hoarded food for later eating, like shrikes.  Some might have left their prey alive but injured; he didn't know.  He'd never been a wild animals guy.

Mozzie might have known.  He kept a mental list of things to fear, wild animals to stay away from.  _He_ might even believe it, if Neal got himself eaten by a dragon.

Mozzie was going to be upset.

Yeah; getting ripped to shreds by a dragon while he was supposed to be on a simple job, made simpler by the fact that the marks, for some part, trusted him?  Hard to blow it any more dramatically than that.  He kinda wondered how long it would take Peter to notice he was dead; tomorrow morning, probably, he'd either check to make sure he hadn't been up to anything suspicious during the night or check when Neal didn't come into the office, and find the anklet in a pile of remains.  Sooner, if the dragon damaged the anklet and alerted the marshals. Really, Neal could only hope that whenever they came, the dragon would be long gone or gorged well enough not to start killing anyone else.

But.  Whatever happened – he shifted, and the dragon shifted with him, still staring him down, blocking the entrance – it was decided, now.  All that was left was the lunge and the kill-swipe, the kill-bite, however these things dispatched their prey.  All that was left was him, staring down the awareness, _I'm not walking out of here._

The dragon pushed its nose forward, scenting him again, and he closed his eyes.  Didn't stop every other sense from picking the beast up, especially when it came back around to his face, the fine scales brushing against his jaw, hot breath with a hint of blood, now.  Blood and fire.  What the _hell_ was it waiting for?

Then his cell phone rang, and he jumped.  Smacked his head on the side of the den and the dragon drew back, as though both of them were startled by this sudden intrusion of day-to-day human reality, so out of place here nestled among the bones.

Neal opened his eyes to see the dragon staring at him almost expectantly, and he fumbled the phone out of his pocket.  _Peter._

Was there anything left to say to Peter?

The thought occurred to him that at least he could leave a suicide note.  Not that this was suicide, exactly; unexpected, unexpectable circumstances, inevitability, recognizing that inevitability when it came.  He supposed that he could have fought back harder, but had a hard time seeing how that would do anything but make it hurt more, longer.  The thing was a _dragon_.  He supposed he could use the opportunity to beg – _Peter, there was a dragon in your house, it's going to kill me, please help me_ , but when life broke its own rules enough to smack you down with with something that wasn't supposed to exist outside of Arthurian legend and summer blockbusters, there was no point in arguing with it.  Wasn't that the theme, the culmination of the themes of his life?  There was no goddamn point.

The dragon's muzzle angled down to the phone in his hand, and on half an instinct, he flipped it open, swallowed down (after a couple of tries) the knot that had taken over his voicebox, and said "Hey."

 _"Hey,"_ Peter said – his voice was a little tinny; the reception in the larder couldn't have been great, and it was a small miracle he'd gotten through at all.  _"Jones just went on a coffee run.  I figured I'd call and – well, I wanted to ask."_

 _Ask._   Ask what?  Not that there was any shortage of options.  Ask, _why do you keep giving me the runaround, Neal.  Ask, why can't we just trust each other, Neal._   Ask _what's it all for? What's it ever been for._   Neal swallowed again, and did a commendable job of keeping his voice even, under the circumstances.  "Ask what?"

It was hard to tell over the crappy connection, but he felt like Peter's voice softened a little.  _"That call.  Just before you left the office.  I was just – any chance it was Sara?"_

 _Sara._   The name was like a flare at the edge of his consciousness, one of the things his brain had already discarded as unimportant to the last few and likely violent minutes of his life.  Like cell phones and conversations and the world outside the range of the dragon's claws.  He took a shuddering breath, and tried to pitch his tone as light as possible.  "No, she... hasn't been taking my calls."

 _"Aw, man."_ There was disappointment in Peter's voice, at that, and – something.  Pity? Sadness? Empathy?  _"That's got to be weighing on you."_

Neal almost laughed, again, but caught it on the way out of his throat.  Yeah, when he thought about it, but there had been other things to think about.  And soon, there'd be nothing.  "Yeah."

There was silence for a moment, and even from here, Neal could tell that Peter was struggling to get the right words in the right order, with the uneasy Peter Burke bull-in-a-china-shop uncertainty of what either of those things entailed.  _"Listen,"_ he said, _"you and I have been... through some stuff, and we've had to keep things from each other–"_

Neal closed his eyes, the words already twisting in his gut.  _You have no idea._

 _"–but if you need to talk,"_ Peter said, and fumbled this next bit: _"I mean... really **talk**... I'm here for you." _

Neal's eyes opened again, eyebrows knitting together.  It was an uncharacteristic statement from "Cowboy Up" Peter Burke, to the suspect and prodigal CI of the department.  "I," he managed, and his throat tried to knot itself up again.  _I'm already dead, Peter._   "–why?"

 _"...why?"_ Peter repeated, with a _did you seriously just ask that?_ tone, and Neal could hear him struggling on the other end.  _"I – look, I know we've had our differences, but – I think... you deserve a little happiness."_   That came out with all the apparent ease of driving a surveillance van through a keyhole.  _"And, whatever I can do to help you with that..."_

He fumbled to a halt.  Neal struggled against another bloody laugh.

 _"Are you all right?"_ Peter asked.

Neal looked up, into the star-blue, ice-blue eyes keeping him pinned against the wall.  There were a lot of things he could say, but that was one of the things he tried to take pride in – he didn't lie to Peter.  He'd deceive him, mislead him, run him in circles, stab him in the back, yeah, but the one glimmer of honor left was that he hadn't lied, not directly, not yet.  "No," he answered, and steadied himself, and kept his eyes on the dragon's.  There was supposed to be an unspoken agreement, wasn't there, between predator and prey?  There was that poem, the poem Mozzie brought out when he was feeling dramatic or making an unsubtle point about law enforcement or wild animals, or when he got on a tear about works whose titles were as long as the works were.  Panero, wasn't it?  _The Hare Pleads with the Hunter in Vain._   "But I will be."

The title was long, as these things went; the text very short.  _The hunter (answer): But I possess only the art of killing, not the power to live._

"Thanks," he said, and if his voice was brittle, if his tone was bone-dry, who'd be able to call him on it.  Now maybe, but in a few moments, who.  "It – means a lot."  He swallowed, and added, "Everything.  Thanks for everything."

There was an odd noise from the other end; concern in Peter's voice.  _"Neal–"_

"I've got to go," Neal said, and killed the line.  Then, as an afterthought, he pulled the battery free of the phone, and tossed both pieces to one side.

He breathed in, tasting the dirt and the cool air and the tang of smoke on the back of his throat.  The dragon was still crouched in front of him, skewering him with its eyes and the angle of its muzzle and the intent rolling off of it in waves.  He forced himself to stay still – as still as he could, with his body still in panic and only his head strangely calm – and face it.

"So when is this going to happen?" he asked, and if his voice splintered a little on the _when_ , well, it didn't much matter, in the end.

The dragon's mouth slacked open, and there was the smell of blood, again.  Blood and fire on the mouth; fire and smoke on the nostrils.  An interesting, if useless, observation.

It pushed its head forward, and Neal sucked in what his body told him would be his last breath.

Except it _wasn't._   This one, any more than the last ones.  The dragon kept the beaklike point of its maw millimeters away from his skin, but didn't snap through his throat, didn't raise its claws to lay open his chest.  Just stayed close, too close, and breathed its blood-and-fire breath and watched him with the same alien and predatory gaze as an eagle, and then pulled back, inch by inch, and with every inch it felt like something else was being slowly ripped away.  One more thing not to know.  Not to be able to rely on.

Neal realized he was shaking – shaking more than he had been, really – when it settled back on its haunches, and he pushed his hand into the dirt and slivers of bone.  "What are you _waiting_ for."

It just sat, and watched him.

The tension in his shoulders crept back into his awareness heartbeat by heartbeat; the intrusion of a larger world, full of uncertainties and impossible choices and consequences always poised just on the moment before springing.  Right where they could – should, _had to_ – be averted.

If the dragon wasn't going to eat him, he had to get out of here.  He shifted, and pushed himself off the back wall and toward the entrance.

The dragon's response was immediate: one hand darted out and caught him, straight on the chest, claws digging into skin and muscle with another clear jolt of pain, throwing him back against the wall again.  This time, the panic and the pain had an attendant surge of anger, and he tried to get his feet under him in the low confines of the den.  "What do you want from me?" he demanded.

The dragon shifted, in a way that might have been circling in had there been enough space in here to circle.

"If you're not going to kill me and you won't let me go, then _why am I here_ ," he demanded.  The dragon looked on, utterly impassive to his demands.

 _Great._   Just one more thing, then.  One more trap, one more unknown that he didn't know how to deal with, and here he was, stuck and stuck and _stuck._   Stuck without a decision to give Mozzie, stuck without a way to signal innocence to Peter, stuck in his cat-burglar jacket and his thief's gloves, in a little draconic larder that _wasn't_ a grave under the Burkes' backyard.

The thought occurred to him, one more time, that _Some say the world will end in fire_ ; well, fire had a chance to take him at the plane, then at the warehouse, and here at the blast of a dragon's breath, and it kept refusing him, every damn time.

He pulled his knees up and put his forehead down on them, wrapped his arms around him, and resisted the urge to scream.

The dragon repositioned itself – he could hear its scales against the wall, its mass settling – but he didn't look up to see it.  It would kill him or it wouldn't, and by now it was looking like it wouldn't, and yet still it didn't seem to _matter_ ; nothing _mattered_ , it was all already irreparably broken and his continued breathing didn't change that.  Maybe it would get bored and leave him alone.  Maybe it would wait for him to starve to death, down here.

Well.  He'd die of dehydration, first.

He didn't realize he was crying, at first, and when he did realize it, he wasn't sure _crying_ was the correct word.  Tears were escaping his eyes, but it seemed more like malfunction; his life had broken down and started going wrong, so why shouldn't his eyes be following?  He wasn't conscious of sadness, just of a hot, dense sense of frustration, of the new holes in his chest seeping and the old ones clotting up, and of the adrenaline turning bitter in his veins and draining out.  And he didn't move, when he realized. What good would it do?  Just kept his head down, and listened to the breath of the monster in there with him.

He didn't know how long it was before something changed.  A scuffling noise at the entrance to the larder; a voice.  "Neal?"

He raised his head, a little, but his brain's reactions were sluggish.

"Neal," the voice called again, and then there was the noise of someone sliding down the passage into the den.  That rousted a belated panic – _Elizabeth_ , his brain provided; Elizabeth was coming down into the dark, crowded space with the dragon.  A _dragon._

"El," he said, and his voice seemed to snap completely in two after the sound.  He'd meant to say her full name, _Elizabeth_ , but didn't get all of it out.  _Have to warn her._   "Look out–"

And then she was in there, crouching in a dress, high heels still on her feet, and putting an arm out and resting her hand on the dragon's neck for support.  The beast turned almost lazily to look at her, casting her face in sudden, shallow relief.

Any warning he could have given died on his lips.

"Oh my god," Elizabeth said, and kicked off her shoes to creep farther into the larder.  "Are you all right?  What happened?"

Neal blinked, and turned his head slowly from her to the dragon.  Elizabeth didn't seem duly or unduly concerned by it, which meant that either she didn't see it, or–

But–

The dragon snorted derisively.

" _Don't_ start," Elizabeth said, sharper than Neal had ever heard her.  But she seemed to be speaking to the dragon, not to him; she eased herself a little further into the space, close enough to reach out and touch him, but she didn't.  Just turned back to him, and said again, "Are you okay?"

He swallowed, a couple of times, and finally strung together, "What's going on?"

"We were going to ask you the same thing," Elizabeth said.  "You really scared Peter.  Are you all right?  Are you hurt?"

"I'm ff _ffff_ –"

He'd started to say _I'm fine_ , a little white lie, barely anything in the scheme of things, but it trailed off into a wracking laugh, and he put his head down again and curled his fingers into fists and clenched his teeth so hard his jaw hurt.  He didn't think he was verging on hysterics, but it still took absurdly long to get his breathing under control enough to speak.

"Where _is_ this?" he asked.  Then, probably the more relevant question: "am I hallucinating?"

Elizabeth paused for a moment, but when she answered, there was a note of cautious humor in her voice.  "You're not," she said.  "Well, if you're seeing a scary, black dragon, that's not a hallucination.  Her name is Ness.  She lives with us – well, she lives with Peter; she tolerates me and Satch.  She doesn't let just anyone see her."

Another unfunny laugh escaped him, and he managed to raise his head enough to look at the dragon – _Ness_.  Like _Loch Ness_ , or _Elliot Ness_ , or _Jack Ness_? he wondered.  Or like none of those things.

"This is – well, I guess it's her room," Elizabeth said.  "I thought there was some sort of trick to keep people from falling into it.  How did you end up here?"

Neal turned to look at her, studying her face, but everything had been jarred out of alignment and he honestly couldn't tell if she knew.  And even in the darkness, with the blue dragon-eye light blunting itself on the walls, it wasn't like it would be hard to guess – he was wearing an outfit that all but screamed _I am here to rob you!_ , and she was bound to know that Peter was off on a stakeout and Neal was nowhere nearby the van, on no sort of undercover operation.  Yeah, there might be a way to smooth-talk his way out of this, but apparently not being killed really took it out of a person; he didn't want to lie and connive any more, try to hold this course between Scylla and Charybdis.  One of them was going to catch him, if he didn't just die.  Might as well go with the one who showed up.

"I asked it–", he started, then corrected himself.  No need to be impolite.  "I asked _her_ not to kill me in your bedroom."  He let his head drop, again; it took a lot of effort, meeting anyone's eyes, and he was so damn tired.  "I'm sorry."

Elizabeth was silent, for a moment.

"I was looking for the art manifest," he said, and it just kept spooling out without a conscious decision; there was too much pressure, and at the first rupture, it seemed like it would all just pour out on its own.  "To find out what pieces would be safe to fence.  To run.  I didn't – I didn't _want_ to.  Not really.  But – no matter what I do, I'm going to disappoint someone, and Peter – he already doesn't trust me."  The laughter tried to come back, edge around his voice.  "And she–" the _dragon_ , _Peter's_ dragon? – "caught me, when I was trying to crack the safe, and I thought she was going to eat me, and I didn't want – no one needs a dead body in their house.  So she took me out here, and she hasn't – eaten me. Yet."

 _And then you came along,_ he thought, _but if you want to walk back outside, I'll understand._

There was another long moment of silence, and then, unexpectedly, Elizabeth's hand on his arm.  He jumped – all nerves, no energy – and Elizabeth said, her voice uncharacteristically rough, " _Neal_."

He tried not to flinch at the sound of his name.

"She's not going to eat you," Elizabeth said.  "Here's what's going to happen, okay?  I'm going to text Peter, let him know that I found you and you're safe.  And then we can talk about this, okay?"

"There's not that much to talk about," Neal said. Elizabeth's hand tightened on his arm.

"There is.  And we'll just talk, okay?"

 _Okay, okay, okay._   She kept saying that word like there was any meaning left to it.  But he nodded anyway, because what else was there to do.

Elizabeth gave his arm what was probably meant to be an encouraging squeeze, and pulled back a little.  He could hear her pulling a phone out of somewhere – maybe she'd left her purse at the lip of the larder – and hear the _tip-tip-tip_ of her texting, then the _snap_ of her own phone closing.  "All right," she said – a nice variation.  "You want to come inside?"

"No," he said, though it was somewhat muffled by his knees.

That, Elizabeth hadn't been expecting, apparently.  She hung on the answer for a moment, then said "Neal, we don't have to be down here.  It's all right."

 _No, it's not._   He could see what she was doing – trying to get him away from the darkness and the bones, back up into some human environment where they could sit down and be civilized and bask in the glow of the compact fluorescents they had installed after the rolling brownouts, doing their part, like good citizens did.  Nothing about that sounded _okay_.  "I don't want to leave," he said, and impressed himself with how even his voice sounded.

Another hesitation, and again ( _again, again, again_ ) she said "Okay, then," and shifted closer to him, brushing aside some of the bones so she could settle in near the wall next to him.

He wanted to tell her that it was fine, _she_ could leave, didn't have to sit on the ground that was even now bruising his tailbone, but all that came out was "You'll get your dress dirty."

"This dress has seen a lot more trouble than some dry dirt," Elizabeth said, with a hint of ribbing to her tone.  He wondered how much was real, and how much was _oh, god, please be okay enough to laugh a little, maybe_.  He didn't laugh.  "Tell me what's going on, Neal.  Are you in trouble?  Is Mozzie?"

He raised his head – his ten-ton, lead-lined anchored-down head, it seemed – and looked at her, blinking.  The thought occurred to him that he could warn her that maybe she shouldn't be down here with him, that maybe she didn't know him as well as she thought she did; he'd already broken into her home, what if the next stop was attacking her.  Maybe then she'd back away, leave him alone.  But it was a ridiculous idea, and he knew it; he could barely pull himself together long enough to give a firm gaze or a solid answer.  She had a _dragon_.  "I don't think I can tell you."

She pursed her lips, clearly trying to work her way through this.  "I'm not my husband," she said, carefully.  "I'm not legally obligated to tell him or any other agent anything unless they arrest me or subpoena me, and I'm very good at avoiding arrests and subpoenas.  I just want to understand, so that maybe I can help you get out of this mess."

"There isn't a way out of this mess," Neal said.

"It's not like you to say that," she pointed out, gently.

No.  It wasn't, he supposed.  "It's out of my hands," he said.  "Look, I know I have a reputation, but I can't _actually_ control other people.  They made up their minds; I don't–"

No.  That felt right, but it wasn't, not quite.

"I only get one choice."

It made sense to him.  But Elizabeth said, "Why don't you start at the beginning?"

He didn't understand; he sent all the mental commands to shake his head, turn away, rest his forehead on his knees again, but none of them seemed to get through.

"How about this," Elizabeth said.  "Just tell me a story.  If it isn't about you or anyone else getting hurt, I promise, I won't tell Peter anything incriminating; I'll just let him think we sat around and talked about your feelings, or something."  He had to smile, a little, at that.  It sounded like conversational Peter-repellant.  "And if there's anything I can do to help you–"

_Whatever I can do to help you with that–_

The smile, shallow as it was, turned uneasy.  "Elizabeth, I broke into your house," he pointed out.  Maybe she'd missed that part?  "Why do you want to help me?"

To her credit, she actually did seem to consider that for a while.

"Because I don't want to keep watching you and Peter circling each other like the sheriff and the outlaw in an old Western," she finally decided.  "Whatever is going on here, it wasn't broken four months ago, and don't try to tell me it's not bothering you, too.  I wouldn't have found you curled up in here, if it wasn't."

Because the proper response to facing down a dragon when you were trying to burgle a house was – what?  To stand and fight?  To negotiate for life, to let it kill you where you stood?

"I want to fix this," Elizabeth said.  "Peter wants to fix this.  Peter wants to trust you."

Neal snorted.  "No, he doesn't."

"Neal–"

"Elizabeth."  He wasn't calm, exactly, but there was a vast emptiness where uncalmness should have been.  "I'm a con man, remember?  I know these things.  When people want to trust you, it's easy to make them trust you.  You can always –  _give_ someone something they're eager to take."

Elizabeth turned that over, for a moment, feeling out the possible responses.  "Maybe," she said.  "Maybe that's not true for everyone.  Or maybe what I mean is – Peter believes in you.  He thinks you can make the right decisions, and he wants to see you make them.  He wants to be _able_ to trust you, Neal."

And at that, there was an ache in his chest that had nothing to do with the dragon's claws and everything to do with, "It isn't who we are."

"I don't believe that," Elizabeth said, with a conviction that surprised him.  "Not for a second.  And if you do, Neal, you're an idiot."

 _That_ was a shock like a slap to the face.

And, like the frustration of being trapped down here, when he thought that he could either die or leave, it came with an attendant surge of anger. Everyone wanted to tell him who he was, what was and was not possible, and how the hell was he supposed to know if any of it was true? Everyone had an angle. Even he did, ostensibly.

"Mozzie is going to leave," he said. There was one angle, out, on the ground. "He wants me to go with him."

Elizabeth considered that. "Do you want to?"

That was the question. The one that didn't quite have an answer, and the one he wasn't expecting. He was expecting a _Were you going to?_ , one he could answer with _What choice do I have?_ , but that was the easy way, he guessed; the same stall tactic, the same refusal to make a choice, that landed him down here. "I don't want him to leave."

"Have you told him that?" Elizabeth asked.

He had to laugh. _He thinks my desire to stay is pathological. What's he going to think of my asking him to stay?_ "He already knows how I feel.

>

"Peter's going to call Diana to take over the stakeout and come home, to see what's up," Elizabeth said.

"Okay," Neal said, but the word was empty. He turned back to the bone-strewn floor.

>

and Elizabeth slipped out of the cave, leaving him with the dragon.  He watched her for a moment, and she stared back at him with the same implacable blue eyes.  After a bit, he put his head down on his knees again.

Peter was in the backyard; Neal could hear his footsteps.  But Elizabeth said something to him – Neal could hear the tone, but not the words – and the footsteps receded, and he heard a soft sound which he thought was the back door being shut.  And then, silence.  His own breathing.  The dragon's breathing.  The distant, muffled sounds of traffic on the street, but silence for all practical intents.

He was expecting a few words exchanged, a quick discussion, and then an interrogation, but the silence seemed to stretch on longer than would be accounted for by that.  After a few minutes it got concerning – what the hell could Elizabeth be trying to put into Peter's head?  Then, it just settled back down into the heavy morass of everything else that was wrong with the world.

The worst Peter _could_ possibly do was kill him, the worst he _would_ possibly do was condemn him, and he'd expected one from the dragon and expected the other from Peter.  It didn't seem like there was much room left for surprises.

The thought passed through his head to count, maybe just count his breath, see how long Peter was absent from here, maybe just do something to while the time. Instead he just sank down into it; time that might as well not have been passing, but pooled in heavy puddles on the larder floor.

Eventually, though, there were Peter's footsteps at the entrance.

 _Great._   The part of this evening he was looking forward to least.

At least Ness was still there, a quiet, implied threat.  He wasn't sure why he found that reassuring, but he did.

Peter came down into the larder, and even in the gloom, Neal was pretty sure the light from Ness's eyes was enough to reveal just how very incriminating he looked. But Peter just picked his way in, moving around the dragon like she was the least concerning part of this all, and gave Neal a long look.

Then, "El said you were in a pretty bad place," he said, carefully.

Neal let out a dry laugh.  "I don't know," he said, picking up a sliver of bone from the dirt floor.  "It has its charms."

Peter shook his head. "I think she meant metaphorically."

Well, of course she had.  But it didn't make the literal interpretation any less true.

"Why are you down here?" Peter asked.

Neal shrugged one shoulder, putting down the bone and resisting the urge to pick through the other ones.  "Your dragon wouldn't let me leave."

Peter turned to look at the dragon, and inclined his head.  "Ness?"

Ness snorted.  Peter shook his head, and turned back to Neal.

"Well, I'm sure she'll let you out now," he said.  "Come on."

>

Elizabeth was setting out two mugs of tea, and

>

"Do you need me?"

>

"Neal, I don't like this any more than you do, but I have to be an FBI agent for a moment, right here."

 _All right,_ Neal thought. His part there was a role that didn't take much thinking, anyway. The fed and the criminal. A part he'd been born to play.

Peter waited a few seconds, then seemed to take his silence as understanding. Perceptive man. "You broke into my house," Peter said, and Neal shifted – really, did he have to hear about this? He already knew all of it. But Peter seemed to want to lay the cards on the table. "There's only one thing you could _want_ in my house, and it's the same thing you tried to get from Diana. And there's only one reason you'd be sniffing around after the art manifest. You have the treasure. Have I gotten anything wrong yet?"

 _What do you think?_ Neal thought. He was too tired to say it. "No."

>

which means you had to have an accomplice, which means it was Mozzie. Who was _conveniently_ taking my wife out this evening."

Yeah. Not their most subtle con. As soon as the light hit it, it fell apart.

But some trace of pique or protectiveness or recalcitrance made it up through the dead weariness, and Neal 

>

while Peter's disappointment fell on him like a gavel.

>

_Unable to perform thy terms too hard, by which I was to hold the good I sought not._

Except he'd managed to convince himself, here and there, that maybe _good_ was something he could reach, if he tried hard enough. That maybe, carved into the corners of his life, he could find a way not to follow in his father's footsteps. In which case, there was no one to blame but himself: he was the one who'd swallowed the lie, made an effort, in whatever faith, to be better than what he was.

>

"Regardless of whether or not it's Mozzie, I'm not going to give this person up."

"Right," Peter snapped.  "Because you don't do that.  You don't casually betray your friends."

Peter seemed to catch himself with a grimace, probably thinking of Elizabeth upstairs and whatever instructions she'd given him in that long talk outside the larder. Neal didn't mind, much; the anger was easier to deal with than any kind of compassion or pity would be. Especially knowing the source.

>

"There's this story about a rattlesnake who asked a boy to carry him up a mountain," Neal said.

Any thought of softening up apparently vanished. Peter's expression got hard, fast.  "Don't give me that _bullshit._

>

"Look, Neal, you can either do this as a suspect, or as an informant.  Those are your options, here.  I can't give you another one."

"I don't have to do this at all," Neal pointed out.

"Yeah," Peter scoffed.  "And then we could throw you back in prison, and you could call your lawyer to show up and talk you out of it.  How do you think that would work?"

 _Not well._ If Mozzie even came, he'd be putting himself into a dance with the FBI that Neal couldn't see working in his favor. And that was if he came. He might just recognize a losing battle when he saw one and light off for parts unknown, resolving to come back for Neal – or not – when things settled down. If they did.

They'd never really talked about contingency plans if one of them were to wind up in jail. Wind up in jail _again_ , in Neal's case. It had been one of the topics that were completely verboten, as though admitting that it was a possibility would bring it down on them.

>

feeling compressed and miserable, and he wanted to be through with this.  He just wanted it _over_.  "Look," he said, staring down into the cooling tea.  "We both know where this is headed.  Why don't you just arrest me and get it over with."

He hadn't intended to call Peter on a bluff, but it looked like he might have.  Peter scrubbed a hand across his face, and groaned.  "I don't _want_ to arrest you," he said.  "I want to understand what the hell happened, here."

"I happened," Neal said. _I'm a criminal. Where's the confusion?_

>

"I'll make you a deal," Peter said, and his voice sounded ground-down.  "I'll walk out of the room.  Ness will stay, but I'll clear out.  I'll give you two minutes to call your accomplice.  In return, you tell me where the treasure is stashed.  You help us recover it so we can return it to the countries it was looted from."

Neal picked up his head, and turned to stare at Peter.  The deal was so lopsided – a two-minute phonecall for dismantling everything he'd been struggling for, aiming for, burning his bridges for, these past months? – that it was hard to interpret it as anything but an insult, for a moment.  Until he remembered that this was Peter Burke, for whom the law was lifeblood, and him implicitly offering _look, you can let an unrepentant criminal walk and we'll just wrap up the crime_ was an olivebranch he might not have offered to anyone else.  Two different worlds, and like everything else, he was wedged between them.

Wedged between them and about to be slammed into the ground of one.  Peter hadn't said anything about what happened after the deal went down.  Might well be, _you tell Mozzie to run, we recover the loot, and you go back to prison._

Then, he had to wonder if that was worse than where he was now.

And damn, but he was tired.  Exhausted from the mortal terror of earlier, sick from the collapse of all his plans, ground down to nothing between the pressures levied on him by the different sides of his life.  He didn't have the energy to fight it anymore.

"Yeah," he said, and let his head fall forward again, let his eyes meet the floor.  "Fine."

There was a moment of silence, and Peter said, "Okay," and stood.

"My phone's back in the cave," Neal said.

Peter put his hands on his hips, and Neal could feel him staring down at him.  "I'll get it," he said, after a moment.

>

to hear Mozzie's breathless trepidation. _"Mon frère! Did you get out? What happened?"_

He'd thought he was burned out on emotion, but the words _get out_ hit him just below the sternum and for a second, it seemed like he couldn't inhale. Like there was something hard as the larder walls, stuck under his throat, and he knew it was there to stay.

He hadn't thought through what he was going to say. _Run_ might be appropriate – he was already going down, and didn't need Mozzie coming with him. A rescue, right now, didn't seem like something he'd survive, even if it was successful. He should toss out a code word, probably. _Bolivia_ , maybe. The one for _it's all gone to hell, and there's nothing left but the firing squad._

 _"...Hello?"_ Mozzie asked, after a moment.

The phone was oddly heavy. "Yeah," Neal said, anyway.

 _"Mrs. Suit vanished, pleading family emergency,"_ Mozzie said. _"You didn't answer your phone. What's our status?"_

Neal could have laughed, at that. If laughter was something he could understand as real, just then. "I'm still here," he said. Then, "Peter's here. It's over."

That about summed up the important bits.

>


End file.
